Description

The sequel to Fallout starts eighty years after its predecessor. When the First Vault Dweller was forced from his home, he walked north until he found some new friends and founded a tribe in a suitable place. But some years after his death, the tribe is dying. The Elders decide that one of the tribe members, the "Chosen One", must find the salvation, a universal tool called G.E.C.K. (short for "Garden of Eden Creation Kit"). Sadly, the hero's only clue are the ancient disks the Vault Dweller has left, and the only equipment are his clothes and PipBoy. With courage and determination the proclaimed Chosen One leaves to save his village, unaware of the consequences his actions will carry.

Visually and gameplay-wise, Fallout 2 is very similar to its predecessor. Combat and character growth are handled the same way, using the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attribute system and relying on skills to customize the protagonist. The sequel's environments are more vast than in the first game, with more non-playable characters populating it. There are more varied dialogue options and ethical choices presented to the player during the course of the game, as well as new weapons, armor, enemies, and a few minor gameplay additions, such as a car the protagonist can drive.

Gameplay-related changes mostly involve the player character's companions. Characters who join the party can now level up, equip armor, and follow specific strategies, as opposed to the almost complete lack of control over party members in the first game. Some characters are also harder to recruit, requiring specific quests to be solved or a certain Karma level. Reputation system is added, which works similarly to Karma (good and bad deeds), but only within the same town or community.

The quests in the game are more numerous and typically involve more complex situations and larger scope. Fallout 2 introduces quests and moral decisions with mature subtext: the player can choose various lifestyles for the main character, including getting married and divorced, become a slave seller, a porn star, or join the mafia.

Trivia

Bess

In Modoc, if you fix Bess the Brahmin's broken leg, she will follow you around the town and even fight on your side in combat. While not immediately beneficial to have a cow as an NPC, it is good for a chuckle. Try using the "Push" icon on her -- yes, even the post-apocalyptic world has cow-tipping. In the end, you can also sell her to the slaughterhouse and get 100 servings of beef jerky in return.

Censorship

German Release - 2 violence levels available - the two most brutal settings are missing

The German and UK version includes further censoring. For example, there are no children in the game.
The absence of children as NPCs makes at least one side quest unsolvable: a boy who has fallen into the well of his father's farm cannot be rescued from it because he simply isn't in it. All other elements of the quest function normally, however. Even the boy's dog who is supposed to lead the player to the boy continues to follow him around.

Endgame

After you finish the game, you can continue playing. You can even use the tanker and go back to the Enclave, only to find the countdown set on the same time you left the Enclave at!

GOG release

In December 2013, Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics were given away for free on the download distribution platform GOG. This was the last month Interplay had the distribution rights for the games before they went to Bethesda. The games were pulled from GOG on January 01, 2014. They were readded to the catalogue with Bethesda as publisher on August 26, 2015.

Logo

In Fallout 2, Interplay's logo of "For Gamers by Gamers" was changed to "For Mutants by Mutants".

Low Intelligence

Playing a character with extremely low intelligence can disable huge amounts of the game's option for the player (because the character is so dumb that he/she can't even talk properly, not to mention skills like "Science"), but there are some unforseen - and humorous - bonuses:

When playing such a character, people will call you a retard and refuse to talk, as you won't understand a thing. Beginning with the Elder in Arroyo, you can find some pretty funny dialogues that way.

Then in Klamath, when talking to Tor, the local idiot, dialogue options suddenly become surprisingly eloquent. This is so funny, that personally I can't find a proper way to describe it - see for yourself. :)

There is at least one quest available only for stupid characters - killing officer Jack for Mira in NCR.

The whole thing with getting the tanker operational is easier for stupids. When you finish the quest of stealing the Vertibird plans for Matthew from Brotherhood of Steel in San Francisco, he fixes the ship, making it ready to go! Your dumb-ass hero only has to push a big button inside the tanker, just skipping the FOB, NavComp and Fuel quests!

If you're interested, search for "The Nearly Ultimate Fallout 2 Guide" by Per Jorner - it's most probably the largest and most precise Fallout 2 guide in existence, it contains much more fun stuff about playing retards. There's even a whole chapter simply called "Stupid".

Mac Release

A Mac version was planed to be released simultaneously with the Windows release, but due to poor sales of the original's Mac port, this idea was eventually scrapped until 2003. So it came out five years after the original Windows release as a full price Mac game!

Patch

The original release was the buggiest thing this side of Ultima IX, to the point of having completely non-working sections of the game (like boxing in New Reno) and though the eventual patch that got released solved most of the problems was not too big in size it presented a major problem: it invalidated all your saved games.

Obviously this was met with lots of anger and frustration from people who had gotten nearly halfway through the game and had to start all over because they couldn't, for instance, talk to a party member no more. The commotion caused the development team to promise some sort of utility that allowed you to convert your saved games, but they eventually (as you can read in the Fallout 2 website) ended up just advising to download one of the character generating hacks that circulate the net to speed up your catching-up process.

Despite the official patches to the game, Fallout 2 still had a few bugs which more or less were an annoyance (mistakes in dialogue, typos, quests becoming unable to complete). Unfortunately, Interplay more or less ignored these bugs and concentrated on their other projects (namely Baldur's Gate). In April 2003, almost five years after the original release of the game, Black Isle Studios released an editor, scripts, a script compiler and accompanying usage documentation. Fans have sought to make the proper fixes, and in turn, tweak the game to be more coherent, namely modifying map graphics and item properties/locations.

Recipes

Following the tradition of the original, Fallout 2's manual comes with another couple of recipes. This time "The Big One" Pancake, and the "Carrion Kabobs".

References

Another tie-in to the original Wasteland game -- in the New California Republic, your character can join the Rangers! This will get you a badge and a map, as well as some experience points. Note that in this game, the main goal of the Rangers is to eliminate slavery -- so if you're playing a Slaver character, you might as well forget it.

Fallout 2 pokes fun at collectible trading card games - specifically Magic the Gathering, and even has a bit of fun with one of the then-developers at Interplay. In the city of Gecko, you'll meet a Ghoul named Wooz. He's He's terribly addicted to the trading card game within Fallout 2 - which is called Tragic: the Garnering. For those who know him - Wooz is a dead ringer for one of Interplay's own developers at the time. It's none other than Bill Dugan - otherwise known as "Weez."

In Modoc, if you take the board off the well and descend, you will notice many coin pouches, and as you pick the first one your character will say "This is MY dream, MY wish, and I'm taking it back. I'm taking them all back." which is exact reference to The Goonies movie from 1985. In the movie, a group of kids are in search of a lost pirate gold. In the process, they run through some well and were about to give up the whole hunt for gold, one of them starts gathering all the wish coins from the well. As another asks him why he is doing that, those coins are someone else's wishes, he replies in same sentence used in this game.

References: Bridge of Death

Before you talk to the robed guy, the player's character mentions that it would be a good idea to save. The robed guy stands at the south side of a bridge, keeping you from crossing it. Being it your choice whether or not to save, if you talk to this guy he'll give you some questions to answer before letting you cross the bridge. First, he'll ask you your name and the purpose of my quest. Then, the next question is which NPC survived from the original Fallout game. If you choose "Dogmeat", he'll go away and say something along the lines of "Why do I always get such stupid jobs!" However, if you choose the bottom response, which is basically asking the guy to elaborate more on the last question, his body will explode, thus allowing you to pass. You can search the body and get his robe. Although it looks like any other robe and sells for the same ordinary-robe price, it is the strongest laser-repelling armor in the game.

If you answer the question wrong, however, a two-headed brahmin will appear. You cannot kill it and it will kill you in one blow. This encounter is reminiscent of a scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Secrets

If you hold shift while on the main screen and click on the "credits", some designer quotes pop-up. Beware, these are not for kids!

S.P.E.C.I.A.L.

The underlying RP system for this game (developed by Interplay) is called SPECIAL. This is an acronym for the seven primary statistics your character has: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck.

Van Buren

Black Isle studios started working on a sequel, code named Van Buren. The new game was to feature vastly improved isometric rendering of the game tiles and smarter interaction with NPCs.

Unfortunately, Black Isles studios was shut down supposedly after completing 90% of the game. Soon afterwards, Bethesda Softworks announced that they were creating a Fallout 3 game. Little has been revealed after that initial announcement.

No Mutants Allowed (Another good source of files, information, Walkthroughs and news. Special attention to PipBoy2000 Section (open new window with lots of editors and tweakers) and Humor Section (really funny things about Fallout 1))